A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:35:01 · Rahul Shivkumar
[00:35:01] S1: Yeah, we looked at the AI BDR solutions at the time, and I think the interesting thing we found, at least in our space, is the old school things like cold calling works really well in healthcare. People pick up the phone because a lot of transactions still happen over the phone in healthcare, so if someone's getting a call, they assume, hey, it could be an insurance company or someone reaching out, so the pickup rates are a lot higher. They're actually, what we're seeing is our pickup rates are close to about 8%, which is like really, really, really high. I think I've heard in other industries it's like closer to like 2% or something like that, so it's like 4x, right? And whenever you see signals like that, it's like, wait, that medium is all of a sudden so much more effective in my industry than it is in other industries, so maybe we shouldn't take a lot of what people in those other industries are saying as like gospel, right? Like we should actually question it because we're seeing data points on our space that show that this could be a better medium. I think we did that pretty well. Like we questioned a lot of, I think, like popular beliefs at the time, which was like, hey, you can automate this, you can have hyper-personalized emails, you can do this, you can do that, and I guess it came down to like, if everyone did it, it's going to get saturated, right? Which you've seen in everything, right? Like the early days of Google Ads, like the few people that advertised a lot were capturing a ton of value and then CPCs and everything went up because everyone was doing it, so I think that was one part. The second was like really understanding like, hey, what is so unique to not just the industry we're in, but the ICP that we're in, right? Like our ICP picks up the phone, right? So like, are these AI SDRs really good on a phone call? No. Right? Like it was like so obvious early on that it sounded robotic and people were hanging up and they were actually getting like really pissed off. So I think that the decision of not going forward with it was solely based on that data point, right? It was like, hey, 8% pickup rate, they're not doing well on phone calls, let's hire people, right?
00:36:46 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:36:46] S0: What about now? Like do you still have the same kind of outbound calling motion? Yeah. So tell me about, yeah, the setup now, like how many BDRs do you have? How many calls per day that I have to do? Like what's the whole setup? [00:36:55] S1: Yeah. So we have six BDRs. They're probably averaging somewhere between 150 and 200 calls a day. [00:36:59] S0: With an 8% pickup rate. So they're doing about like whatever, 20-ish calls, actual calls. [00:37:04] S1: Exactly. So they're talking to at least 15 human beings every day, right? Times five. So that ends up being quite a bit of shots on goal where you're actually talking to a person. On average, our BDRs book about like two meetings a week. It's like close to 1.9, I think is like the average or something like that. [00:37:22] S0: So it's kind of a 10% first call to demo book ratio. Yes. What's the show up rate on those demos? [00:37:28] S1: The show up rate is about like 80% or so. [00:37:30] S0: Oh, wow. [00:37:31] S1: And there's like obvious things you can do, right? On the call being like, did you get the calendar invite? Great. Are you confirmed for this? And then the day of like send them a text being like, hey, this is me. I know we have a call. [00:37:40] S0: Was that ever an issue though? Like have you, have you through that increased the show up rate? Yeah. Well, how low was it? [00:37:44] S1: I think, I think the lowest of was was like 60-ish.
00:37:44 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:37:44] S1: I think, I think the lowest of was was like 60-ish. [00:37:47] S0: Okay. So it was still decent and you got, you went from 60 to 80. Yeah. That 60 to 80 was mainly optimizations around calendar invites, you know, reminders, et cetera, et cetera. [00:37:56] S1: Correct. And then not booking a meeting too far out, right? Like there's, there's a lot of basic like hygiene I think you can optimize on once you figure out a medium is working pretty well. [00:38:05] S0: I mean, there's people that have way worse show up rates, like 20, 30%. I'm just, I don't know if you, given that you didn't experience this, maybe you don't know because what you could have is, you know, instead of booking 10%, you book 20%, but half don't show up. You know what I mean? Like a lot of people actually face that problem. Are you doing anything in those calls, those first calls to just make sure that the people that book are kind of clearly intentional and really actually want to speak to someone?
00:38:26 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:38:26] S1: Yeah. I think we're very good about the lists of like, we've honed in very well on our ICP, right? Like, and I highly recommend that by the way, like rather than spray and pray and talk to everyone in an organization, for us, there's probably in an organization of 200 people, only five people that really matter. You know, you go too high as an example, when you start off, if it's an organization of 200 people, you're trying to get the CEO on a phone call, he's going to no show, right? Even if you book him on a thing, he's like, it's just like not something that like the C-level gets on a cold call or a first call, right? Eventually, you want to talk to them. So I think you find a way to network to them, but there's like five people within the organization you really have to talk to and we've incentivized it that way, right? We're like, hey, this counts as a qualified lead if this person shows up to a call and these are like their titles, right? Like if it's going outside of that, like we, honestly, if you get the CEO on a first call, like we don't care, right? Like we want you to get one of these five people and I think that actually works super well because like when you incentivize smart people a certain way, they're going to follow those behaviors. Sure. Yeah. [00:39:28] S0: How, just taking a step back, actually, how do you build, what do you use to build a list?
00:39:28 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:39:28] S0: How, just taking a step back, actually, how do you build, what do you use to build a list? [00:39:32] S1: Yeah, so we're using, I think a lot of the obvious things. We're using Clay, we have like a master list of like healthcare organizations. We actually use the NPI registry too because all of our organizations have to register with a national provider identification number. So we've pulled that, we've enriched it using Clay, we've enriched it using ZoomInfo. So I think the thing there that was very helpful was actually having a primary source, like something like a, like a ZoomInfo as an example, but then also having a backup, right? If the ZoomInfo number is wrong, like maybe you're using Apollo or something like that as a backup, you're not just giving up because one thing on contact information, you're actually using like a, Clay helps you use like the waterfalls, which is very useful, but we found that to be super useful too. [00:40:14] S0: And are you doing multi-touch like LinkedIn, email outreach, plus the call or just straight the call? [00:40:18] S1: Pretty much. I think the touches that really work well for us are the phone call works well, LinkedIn works well, and I think we do a lot of conferences. So we meet people in person, we send our BDRs to a lot of conferences. People told us not to do it, they're like, hey, send AEs, but BDRs, like their lists are so specific that they actually, like what we want them to know is like these companies like the back of their hand.
00:40:18 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:40:18] S1: Pretty much. I think the touches that really work well for us are the phone call works well, LinkedIn works well, and I think we do a lot of conferences. So we meet people in person, we send our BDRs to a lot of conferences. People told us not to do it, they're like, hey, send AEs, but BDRs, like their lists are so specific that they actually, like what we want them to know is like these companies like the back of their hand. [00:40:41] S0: Oh, do you hypervert why you should have asked that? So you have somebody calling just dermatologists, for example. [00:40:45] S1: We've tried that in the past, but we actually have like logos now typed to like BDRs, right? It's like, hey, you have this set of like thousand logos that could be dermatologists, it could be behavioral health, it could be other verticals. Okay. When we've tried to verticalize, our business does have more success in some verticals than others. So you're setting like an unfair. [00:41:03] S0: Yeah, okay, okay. [00:41:04] S1: You give someone behavioral health as an example, which is where initially we had a ton of growth. Now it's like, [00:41:09] S0: Right, they seem like the best BDR of all of them or whatever. Yeah, you just set them up for failure or success, I bet. [00:41:13] S1: And then other people are like quite frustrated. So we did that. Early on, we were like that. Now we've like normalized it a little bit.